Carceral Entanglements: Medicine, Hunger Strikes, and the Promise of Solidarity

• In Event: Authenticity and Resistance

Abstract

This paper theorizes the entanglements of politics and medical ethics in prison hunger strikes. It focuses on the 1989 case known in medical ethics as “Kalk’s refusal,” in which William Kalk, a physician in a Johannesburg hospital, invoked medical ethics to refuse to release hunger striking detainees back into state custody. In medical literature, this case is commonly understood as a successful defense of medical autonomy over and against politics. I draw on Michel Foucault, Michelle Murphy, and Bonnie Honig to develop a different interpretation of this case, focusing on the entanglements of medicine and state power, to depict Kalk’s actions as a practice of problematization that enacted solidarity with the protesters against apartheid. My reading offers an account of physician resistance through a subversive appropriation of medical ethics when other scholars read medical ethics solely as a form of biopolitical governance (Nayan Shah) and privilege martyrdom as resistance to biopower (Achille Mbembe; Banu Bargu).

Author

• Anna M. Terwiel, Trinity College